How do you tell your twins apart?

Those of you using industrie 4.0 will be familiar with the concept of a digital twin. Others will know it as an offline simulation environment.

So you have a copy of your control system with a life-like simulation running behind it. What do you do to make sure people don't run 'tests' on the live system, thinking it is the digital twin? And how do you make sure people don't assume it is the digital twin throwing alarms when the real machine is having problems?

I've build simulations in the past where every sensor and material flow and everything else was completely simulated and connected to real systems.

It's very easy to make a mistake. Customers I know that are using test environments that are real simulations keep them completely separate from the real deal. Basically you have to get out of your chair and go to another room to gain access.

Normal users would never gain access to the simulation from their workstations, just automation engineers.

These are environments where an unplanned production stop is very costly.

I am in the process of getting something like this up and running to dry test a PLC change and attempt it over a weekend.

Where I worked, because of the cost of downtime, we had a server and PLC of each that was useful for some testing as well as creating and testing backups from the field.